Wednesday, November 04, 2009

What went well: my students seemed to get into the activity, coming up with ingredients for dishes they were going to mock-prepare, and using French. One even had a whole conversation with a woman working at the market who was French, and the woman thought he was French! This was an unexpected surprise.

What didn't go well: the French woman in question was annoyed that my student was only mock-looking to buy however many pounds of meat, and wanted to know why I'd told my students to speak French to the farmers, that is, why I'd assumed farmers in New York would speak French. I then explained to her, in French, that I had not expected any of the farmers to necessarily be/speak French, and that the conversation they had had just sort of happened (someone at another stand had alerted my students to the presence of a real-life French person at that stand), but was not part of the exercise, which was essentially about looking at what the stands sold and speaking French to one another. I may never be allowed to buy from that stand in the future, although it's not one I usually go to, so oh well.

And... the time change! It was nearly dark out for this, which it wasn't supposed to be, but I forgot about the time change and I teach at 5. That made the whole market-day aesthetic somewhat lacking, even though the market was still quite active.

But the main thing was that I gave my students a good amount of work, but not enough to do actually at the market, so while I expected students might leave early, 40 minutes early is far earlier than I'd hoped. Notes for next time...